After too long saying, “I know you are but what am I?” to anybody pointing out that Republicans have frequently behaved in horribly racist ways since President Obama first ran for president, the enabling has reached its culmination. At least I hope it doesn’t get worse than this:

“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser said of Mr Romney, adding: “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have”.

What is there to say? Except too many will not say, because it just seems so improbable that a campaign official would be that openly racist, surely there must be some excuse! But shouldn’t we wait to hear what that excuse is from Mitt, instead of making it for him?

What’s up, Mitt? Do you stand by your advisor’s blatantly racist attack on President Obama?

-hw

UPDATE: Romney spokesman denies any agreement with advisor, which is to be expected, I suppose. We can afford it the standard weight any Romney camp denial warrants. Can we find out more about who this advisor was, Mitt? Nobody buys that you don’t know who it was.

Of course, economists have found that Republican “jobs” plans, which I’ve previously scoffed at, would create no jobs in the next five years and would create no more than “marginal” numbers after that. What’s the point? To get things Republican donors already wanted:

Carl Riccadonna, a senior economist at Deutsche Bank, said some of the bills could create jobs, but that they would amount to more of an afterthought in terms of achieving broader policy goals.

“They are very narrowly targeted, and it gives the impression that maybe some of this is special interest really pursuing these, not really taking a macro view but a very, very micro focus in what the impact would be,” Riccadonna said. For most of the bills in the package, “jobs are a second- or third-order effect, not the main priority.”

At the heart of the GOP jobs package is a push for rolling back regulations — and gutting environmental laws that regulate clean air and water — to spur job growth.

It’s rotten enough that we’re asked to trade clean air and water for jobs, but the promised jobs are just that, promises. In the end, the Koch brothers get a little more profit for themselves because they spend less money on protecting the environment, and everybody else gets heavy metals in their drinking water as compensation while they ship the money to an offshore account.

Republicans are against any direct action that would lower unemployment numbers, because high unemployment numbers are their only tool against Obama. They certainly don’t have a worthwhile candidate. So this is win-win for them, as they keep their industrial overlords content while doing nothing for the economy, making things harder for Obama while keeping the campaign cash flowing.

How clean water doesn’t interest them, well, you’ll have to figure that one out.

I too was at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises, and all I can really say about the tragedy is that we can’t take a reactionary approach and take out our horror over what happened on the movie that brought all those people together. They were there because they loved Christopher Nolan’s painfully brilliant Batman films, and they would have been thrilled with the movie had their lives not been so pointlessly taken off-course.

We must not let such killers have sway over us. Those who wish to terrorize and massacre want to be feared. They want to live in our minds. We must instead soldier on, while mourning the dead.

Celebrate their lives by celebrating their passions. Go see the movie.

Then look at the ad Mitt Romney has released, editing out-of-context the phrase “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that” where “that” unequivocally refers to the American “system,” and “roads and bridges.

So the question is, did the guy in this ad get the full quote, or just the Romney-ed version? Because he should care about being lied to. And if he did see the full quote, expressing a sentiment that Mitt Romney repeated almost word for word himself just days later, while attacking Obama, then there you have a case study in completely fake winger sentiment. How earnest he is! I’m proud of the guy for what he accomplished, but guess what? So’s Barack Obama, and he said nothing less.

The only remaining question is who’s lowering themselves to the other’s level, Mitt Romney or the GOP base?

-hw

P.S. More questions: Are we to believe that maybe Republicans do think they personally built the roads they drive on? Or the Internet they’re spreading this smear around on?

UPDATE: Remember, Romney did this before. This counter-attack, once again, applies:

He was listed as President, CEO, and sole stockholder of Bain until 2002 on SEC filings that carry criminal penalties if they are false.

He doesn’t dispute that he owned the company, lock, stock and barrel.

During that time we know that he was paid at least $100,000 – an enormous sum to most jurors. You don’t get paid that kind of money for doing nothing.

We don’t know how much more he was paid because he won’t release his taxes.

Before he ran for Governor of Mass in 2002, he talked about how he attended board meetings for Staples and Marriott – two Bain Companies during that time period.

He is responsible, like all CEOs, for what Bain did through 2002.

He says it took three years to “change the name of the CEO”? Bain would target a company, swoop in, divert all the cash, pick the bones, fire the employees and be gone in less time than that.

His story is (insert synonym for bullshit)

And:

…could you imagine the outcry from the GOP if Obama claimed to be a “passive” owner of the company that was involved in disposing of aborted fetuses, and that his titles of CEO, etc., were of no significance? They would be apoplectic, and if he had given testimony like Romney under oath that he was not involved, the impeachment charges for perjury would already be drawn up.

What I love is the fake indignation Romney’s trying to muster after building his campaign on one blatant lie after another about Obama. Oh, but Obama suggests Romney might be responsible for Bain, and Romney immediately hurls the charge of “liar,” when everybody and their grandma knows Romney is a liar of such magnitude that cynical political observers are awestruck. But as the document dump continues, more and more evidence piles up that Romney himself hasn’t been able to keep his Bain stories straight.

But on the evening when the divisive former vice president opened his home at the foot of Wyoming’s majestic Teton Range to host a $4 million fundraiser for the presumptive Republican nominee, Romney’s campaign labored to avoid any photos or videos of the two men together.

While Thursday night’s fundraiser in some ways symbolized a passing of the torch from the previous Republican administration to Romney, Cheney remains a deeply polarizing figure, and Romney campaign aides went to great lengths to control how much the public would see from the event.

When Romney arrived at the Teton Pines Country Club for a late-afternoon reception, he was spotted shaking Cheney’s hand and giving Lynne Cheney a kiss on the cheek. But campaign aides quickly escorted reporters who were watching the exchange out of view.

Come on, boys, take one together…

-hw

p.s. Dick Cheney is awfully ungrateful to Obama for not prosecuting him for war crimes, isn’t he?

1. Bend me over and call me Candy. Democrats have finally realized it’s okay to go on the offensive with the ACA, and that it was always stupid to run scared from a historic victory. There’s not many historical parallels for such behavior that I can recall, as generally an army did not retreat after sacking a castle. Personally, the fact that Republicans had to constantly make up stuff like “death panels” and blather about socialism is precisely what illustrated how weak and arbitrary the Republican case was, requiring most Republicans to disavow themselves of all previous convictions in favor of the individual mandate. It was always an opportunity to promote liberal values of health care for all, financial responsibility, and to reshape the forces driving health care costs upwards.

While the topline approve/disapprove polling averages may not have shifted much — the country remains evenly divided on the law — there is plenty of polling evidence to suggest positive movement for Democrats. According to a recent Kaiser poll, a plurality of Americans support the Supreme Court’s decision. More important, a clear majority — 56 percent — now say they think opponents of the law should give up and move on. Just 38 percent think Republicans should continue trying to block implementation of the law. A recent Bloomberg poll found that Americans strongly support most of the provisions in the law and that few want to repeal in its entirety when given the option of also expanding it or preserving certain provisions.

3. The Mormon church is all about prosperity theology. Most of that ten percent tithe goes towards building the Mormon business empire, including giant shopping malls. Really, I am just waiting for the American right to convert to Mormonism. The rightwing version of Christianity is so far deviated from the Bible they might as well embrace the America Fuck Yeah religion.

4. It used to be so easy beating up on Michael Gerson’s baffling constant variance with the truth that I got tired of it, but these withering takedowns bring back the nostalgia.

7. So it’s $3 trillion in cash America’s largest companies are sitting on now? We’re in a vicious cycle where capitalism has been rejiggered to direct all profits to the top, leaving a smaller middle class to drive the economy with their spending. Thirty years of Reagan’s supply-side economics has led to an explosion of supply, with no demand. When will we return to a balanced approach?

So Romney was part of Bain years after he said that he had departed which isn’t difficult to accept in light of his past troubles with telling the truth but what his company did during that time directly conflicts with his messaging about his sympathy for main street America and Joe Sixpack.

At the time Romney was acquiring shares in Global-Tech, the firm publicly acknowledged that its strategy was to profit from prominent US companies outsourcing production abroad. On September 4, 1998, Global-Tech issued a press release announcing it was postponing completion of a $30 million expansion of its Dongguan facility because Sunbeam, a prominent American consumer products company and a major client of Global-Tech, was cutting back on outsourcing as part of an overall consolidation. But John C.K. Sham, Global-Tech’s president and CEO, said, “Although it appears that customers such as Sunbeam are not outsourcing their manufacturing as quickly as we had anticipated, we still believe that the long-term trend toward outsourcing will continue.” Global-Tech, which in mid-1998 announced fiscal year sales of $118.3 million (an increase of 89 percent over the previous year), also manufactured household appliances for Hamilton Beach, Mr. Coffee, Proctor-Silex, Revlon, and Vidal Sassoon, and its chief exec was hoping for more outsourcing from these and other American firms.

Read the Wall Street Journal editorial page or turn on CNBC at any hour of any day and you’ll be told that companies are forced by lazy, greedy American looters and moochers to off-shore jobs and that’s a good thing BECAUSECAPITALISM. So why would the Romney campaign feel the need to deny doing what the market demands? If they were consistent with industry agitprop they would embrace the label as a virtue, hand the campaign microphone to the Reason magazine staff and have them explain how all rights not bestowed by private property are artificial and that working for seventy cents an hour is as natural as gravity.

They’ll continue to lie about Bain’s activities because they know that when exposed under harsh daylight reasonable individuals will find them contrary to their own instincts of survival and plain common sense. As Josh Marshall pointed out yesterday, when your opponent’s message is that he’s a gazillionaire and that his aim is to make sure that gazillionaires benefit the most from his policies it shouldn’t be difficult to form a reelection strategy highlighting these simple truths.

In twenty plus years of arguing with rightwingers, it’s become no surprise that basic skills like reading comprehension or rudimentary principles of statistics are immediately thrown out the window when there’s propaganda at stake. If you can put some numbers on paper, it’s good enough for most of them, especially bottom-feeder king Drudge. Thus, the stat that 83 percent of doctors considered quitting over Obamacare ran all day, and was accepted as fact by millions of Republicans today. Fortunately, some light has been shed on the methodology:

The survey was conducted by fax and online from April 18 to May 22, 2012. DPMAF obtained the office fax numbers of 36,000 doctors in active clinical practice, and 16, 227 faxes were successfully delivered… The response rate was 4.3% for a total of 699 completed surveys.

Rick Perry, who proved in the Republican primaries that he could give Sarah Palin a run for her money for the title of Dumbest Governor Evah, has some partisan points to earn, for some reason.

The man is already at the highest point of his career. And yet BECAUSE TEXAS he will ignore the needs of his constituents and the status of his state as having the most uninsured residents and grab onto the opportunity for a few more Tea Party points by resisting the Obamacare efforts to provide more healthcare for his citizens.

One in four Texans are uninsured, the highest rate of any state. The Medicaid expansion would cover 49.4 percent of uninsured Texans by 2019, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The program is broadened to cover Americans within 133 percent of the poverty line — currently the eligibility for a working Texan parent cuts off at 27 percent. The federal government will cover the full cost of the first three years and pay 90 percent thereafter.

So there’s really no sacrifice for him to speak of. All he has to do is sit back and let the federal dollars roll in to cover Texas residents, but he won’t. What’s their reward? The cool, juicy sensation of avoiding SOCIALISM.

At some point, Americans have to start to wonder how much this Quixote quest against Teh Socialism is going to cost them, and if they’d have to be sacrificing so much if Republicans could figure out some other tactic against a Democratic president after eight years of Bush so thoroughly discredited the GOP brand. What else must we give up before the 1% will stop bankrolling Republicans to avoid paying their taxes?